Hope can be difficult to hang on to sometimes. We want to believe things will get better, but disappointments continue to come. We think we are just in a hard season, but the hard season never seems to end. We know that Christians are supposed to have hope, so we beat ourselves up for feeling despair. We think that feeling hopeless must mean we are not very good Christians.
But the people of God have struggled to hang onto hope throughout the ages. Such is life in a broken and scary world that is under the shadow of sin and in the grip of the evil one. Not to mention that struggling with hope is intrinsic to following a God we cannot see. Faith in Jesus comes will all sorts of challenges, internal and external, spiritual and emotional and physical. Because this is the way of things, struggling with hope is not necessarily evidence that your faith is not real. Indeed, it could be evidence that you are grappling honestly with the pain and sin and confusion in and around you. Every honest Christian confesses that hope is hard to maintain and has been since Genesis 3.
Because holding onto hope is so hard, commands like Hebrews 10:23 can feel impossible to carry out: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” How do we hold onto our hope “unswervingly,” or “without wavering”? This feels impossible when our hope often feels like a ship rising and falling in the North Sea. But honor the command we must.
I think the answer to how we hold onto hope is at the end of verse 23 and into verses 24-25. The reason we can hold onto hope is because “he who promised is faithful” (v. 23). The Lord has made promises to us and he never breaks a promise. He never speaks idle words; what he says he does. And he said he will be with us till the end and then bring us home to a land of glory that he uniquely designed as a place where we will never stop experiencing his grace and kindness (Eph. 2:7). He sealed this promise with his blood and guarantees it by putting his very presence in us as a downpayment of our future reward (Eph. 1:13-14). So we can hold onto hope because the Lord is holding onto us by living in us, walking us by the hand as it were, all the way to heaven.
But that is all so abstract and ethereal. We believe these things to be true, but we struggle to “hold onto” these truths with our hearts moment by moment, day by day, season by season. We believe the Lord is with us and will bring us home, but we still struggle with so much nagging despair. Why doesn’t our faith in Christ squash these fears and anxieties?
Because, as Hebrews 10:24-25 says, holding onto hope must be a community project: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” In other words, hope grows in the soil of our hearts when we are planted and engaged in a local church.
The church is where we are “spurred on” to keep loving God and doing good for others. Our life together as a church is important because God has not designed us to be self-motivating all the time. We need each other’s prayer, correction, and encouragement so that we may be able to persevere in hope. As we walk toward heaven with other brothers and sisters, we realize we are not alone in our despair or doubt or struggle with sin or bouts of depression or worldly desires. And as we love one another in the midst of the struggle, we see tangible pictures of Jesus’ love for weak and weary and broken and sinful people. Giving and receiving love in the context of a local church may be the clearest picture of heaven on earth we will see in this world.
Matthew McCullough, in his new book on heaven, mentions several specific ways we can portray heaven in the church. He says, “Join a church, with real people marked by limits and flaws, and bear with them. Be patient with the struggling teenager who needs a good friend to disciple him. Be kind to the aging member who needs a ride to church every single week. Rejoice with the woman who has the family you long to have because love does not envy. Speak up when you see a friend embracing what God has condemned when it would be so much easier to say nothing because love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but only in the truth. Believe the best of the frequent stumbler who’s trying again to fight for obedience; stand by him over and over again. Organize your life to hold out hope to friends who will sometimes struggle to see it on their own.”
What can you do to help a brother or sister persevere in hope? What do you need someone to do for you to help your hope? Acknowledging your need and asking for help is one of the most hope-full things you can do because it means you are being honest about your inadequacy and looking outside yourself for help.
Do you see how our love for one another sustains and increases our hope in God? McCullough again, “Love is costly but often uncomplicated. And love is our mission in the church, until Christ comes again. We get to display the beautiful life of heaven until the love of God makes all things new.”
Holding onto Hope, With You,
Pastor John